I’m teaching a Shakespeare seminar this semester ("Shakespeare and Rome") and last night was the first class; we are reading the three Roman plays. Began with the last few lines of the Symposium and then right into Coriolanus; bracing, austere, hard stuff, no pleasantries, nothing but turmoil and war, civil and foreign. "Get you home, you fragments." I love that line. Anyway, I caught this nice essay on Macbeth by Theodore Dalrymple, "Why Shakespeare is For All Time" in the City Journal that is a three coffee read. "I think nothing equals Macbeth," Lincoln wrote in 1863. I am reminded of Lincoln reading from Macbeth on the boat after he visited the fallen Richmond in 1865. "Duncan is in his grave,/ After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well./ Treason has done its worst. Nor steel, nor poison,/ Malice Domestic, foreign levy, nothing,/ Can touch him further."